The Talos Principle, Croteam's fantastic first-person puzzle game has a fresh beta available to test with some major changes.

It includes massive changes under the hood, including a much more up to date version of their Serious Engine. This brings with it 64bit by default, OpenGL removed in favour of Vulkan along with "various other optimizations, fixes, and tweaks that will make your gameplay experience better without you knowing why that is".

I did a few benchmarks this morning just to see how it's working now and unsurprisingly the Linux version remains incredibly smooth. With the performance options cranked to Ultra, rendering at 1080p and MSAA x4 on it was hitting an average of 112 FPS.

To access it, all you need to do is select the "publicbeta" branch on Steam. You can find it by right clicking the game in your Steam library, going to Properties and hit the Beta tab of the UI. From there, it's in the dropdown box:

I assume they're testing the engine for upcoming titles using the older game. Seems like a good idea, since they can see real-world results and the fans get an update for their existing library for free. A true win-win!

I always wondered why they still had 32bit as the default, good to see that this has been changed now to 64bit and especially Vulkan... I won't miss the OpenGL support at all! :-) The update works great, no issues so far!

raneonI always wondered why they still had 32bit as the default, good to see that this has been changed now to 64bit and especially Vulkan... I won't miss the OpenGL support at all! :-) The update works great, no issues so far!

I am still downloading the beta on my desktop. The old version should be kept as an option because it does work on my laptop with intel HD 4400 and Vulkan does not work there (simple benchmarks do work bun not anything like Talos). What I think really nobody needs is the 32bit nonsense.

Awesome! I was surprised by how poor the performance was with Vulkan before, but they were working against a moving target when they did the first version so it is understandable that the performance might be sub-par because of that. Hopefully this makes a big difference! Looking forward to seeing benchmarks, since I've already finished the game
Might try it out a little though!

raneonI always wondered why they still had 32bit as the default, good to see that this has been changed now to 64bit and especially Vulkan... I won't miss the OpenGL support at all! :-) The update works great, no issues so far!

I am still downloading the beta on my desktop. The old version should be kept as an option because it does work on my laptop with intel HD 4400 and Vulkan does not work there (simple benchmarks do work bun not anything like Talos). What I think really nobody needs is the 32bit nonsense.

I tried Serious Sam 2017 Fusion as well and there OpenGL support is gone already, but maybe it is available in the previous version. If there is an issue with ANV it is probably the best to write a bug report (if not done yet).

Ok I run the game on my amdgpu desktop and it feels a lot better! (I had some microstuttering before) nice :-)

raneonI tried Serious Sam 2017 Fusion as well and there OpenGL support is gone already, but maybe it is available in the previous version. If there is an issue with ANV it is probably the best to write a bug report (if not done yet).

I am not talking about any bug with the game. It is just the way it is with vulkan on intel HD 4400. It is very clear that vulkan support is only experimental on that gpu. I am just saying that they simply just not completely delete that as an option. They do keep even older legacy and a lot less useful options there, so I am not really concerned.

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